Reading about Selig's commentary on the Bosch investigation tonight, I ran across this quote on ESPN:
To be quite honest, the latter half of the quote was just sort of "yada yada yada" to me at this point. I've read a lot about steroids and Biogenesis at this point. Not so for the first half of the quote though. Am I the only one on here who knows next to nothing about the "cocaine era" in baseball?"We went through the cocaine era of the '80s and there was no drug-testing agreement, which was quite sad. The Pittsburgh drug trials -- very sad, and still no drug-testing agreement. Now here we are, 30 years later with the toughest drug testing agreement in American sports. We must be doing something right. I haven't heard from anyone in Washington in eight and a half years."
I was a kid in the 1980s, and I remember some stuff about the 1986 Mets being coke addicts while they made their run to the World Series (mostly Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry, but I know there were others, too). I have to admit, though, that I know almost nada about the "Pittsburgh drug trials." So what the heck happened? I know Dave Parker came to the Reds from Pittsburgh, and he was a cocaine addict before that... but that's about it, and that's a reach, I freely admit. So instead of using The Google to find out some stuff, I thought I'd have RZ flex its powerful group brain to give me some information on this topic, since I know we have a lot of people with a lot of baseball history knowledge to burn on here.
Also -- isn't Selig mixing apples and oranges when he compares cocaine and steroids? I mean, last I checked, cocaine is a hell of a drug -- but it couldn't be called "performance enhancing" in any way, right?
Discuss.